Comment 37864

By Mahesh_P_Butani (registered) - website | Posted February 05, 2010 at 14:27:51

Could Gore North become our version of SoHo?

Go-No? Unlike SoHo where opportunities were enthusiastically seized to reinvent Urban living - in our GoNo, we have taking great pains to level the playing field over decades, and now are deferring taking advantage of the opportunities that offers us a fresh start.

Our Xanadu has been right here all along, beneath our noses. Our tabula rasa for new beginnings!

Instead we have been searching for our identity in collaboratives and round-tables.

When we do get around to self-directing our energies - especially during an election year, - votes drive our thoughts, rather than ideas with which to rebuild our city wisely, block by block:

Out of the seven or eight large parcel of land between King Street East & Wilson Street; and James & Mary - the three large undeveloped blocks bounded by Wilson, Rebecca, Hughson N, and Mary - have the greatest potential to make our core come alive again.

In many ways it is the only tangible assets left in the core - for our NEXT generation. Can we rise to the challenge?

It is these three large and compelling development sites, in conjunction with the other vacant lots surrounding it - which offer our downtown core an opportunity to create innovative HIGH-DENSITY mixed-use development that WILL bring economic growth back to the core - while increasing the commercial/residential/green-industrial assessment revenues for the city.

Using these prime vacant lands which are in extreme short supply - for public funded educational or privately developed religious use, will basically remove these properties from the assessment roll forever - right at the time when we need higher urban assessment revenues. Besides forsaking for ever, the potential of achieving much higher densities and inspiring new urban job growth with innovative building type and mixed-uses.

GoNo is an acronym which tells it, like it is!

Let us drive our inspiration for Gore North from the Hamilton Bay Area instead - and turn the northern part of the Core into a BaySouth - an area that can be full of hope and good decision making - and a cost-effective bridge between the Core and the Bay.

If we can think and design high or even super-high in our new BaySouth District - we may even begin to enjoy our beautiful Bay from heights of our mixed-use towers of living, working and playing - right here on Wilson and King William in our core.


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As I had mentioned earlier: "We ...need to be extra vigilant about the remaining few large land parcels on the east-west axis, and the larger lands to the north of the core. It is from the quality of development of these parcels that the true potential of our core will be extracted or destroyed forever."


“I try to open up our spatial imaginaries to ways of thinking and acting politically that respond to all binarisms, to any attempt to confine thought and political action to only two alternatives, by interpreting an-Other set of choices. In this critical thirding, the original binary choice is not dismissed entirely but is subjected to a creative process of restructuring that draws selectively and strategically from two opposing categories to open new alternatives.” – Edward Soja, Thirdspace.

Our NEXT Urban Identity demands new ways of seeing - new ways of thinking. Our new alternatives can only spring from this:

Comment edited by Mahesh_P_Butani on 2010-02-05 13:28:57

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